North Face of Soho

After "Unreliable Memoirs", "Falling Towards England" and "May Week Was in June" comes the next instalment in the ongoing saga that is Clive James's life.

His fourth - and eagerly awaited - volume of autobiography promises to be every bit as eventful, entertaining, engrossing and honest as the previous three.

At the very end of "May Week Was in June", we left our hero sitting beside the River Cam one beautiful 1968 spring day, jotting down his thoughts in a journal.

Newly married and about to leave the cloistered world of Cambridge academia for the racier, glossier life promised by "Literary London", he was, so he informed his journal, reasonably satisfied.

With his criticism beginning to appear in magazines and newspapers such as the "New Statesman", and his poetry published in "Carcanet", as well as a play then being performed to rave reviews at the Arts Theatre, James had good reason to be content.

But what happened next? This is the question posed, and answered by, "North Face of Soho".

Intelligent, amusing and provocative - the words apply to the man himself as much as his memoirs - it's a book that can't come soon enough for the legions of Clive James fans worldwide.'His proses mixes together cleverness and clownishness, and achieves a fluency and a level of wit that makes his pages truly shimmer' - "Financial Times".